Knowledge Base · Communication
What goes on a huddle board?
A good huddle board has four sections: celebrations, key performance indicators shown as trends, action items with a parking lot, and team updates. Chapter 2 of the book lays out the four and stresses the trend, not the daily number: a simple run chart shows whether performance is improving, flat, or slipping.
The huddle board is the visual centre of the daily huddle. Whether it is a whiteboard in the workspace or a digital board, its job is to tell the team's story at a glance and move the state of the work out of private memory and hidden spreadsheets into public view. Chapter 2 of the book gives four sections as the starting point:
- Celebrations: wins and appreciation, from a milestone hit to a thank-you for a colleague. Starting here sets the tone.
- KPIs and trends: the team's few most important measures, charted over time rather than shown as a single day's number.
- Action items and parking lot: the obstacles raised in the huddle, each with an owner and a due date, plus a place to park good ideas that belong in a different conversation.
- Team updates: announcements, deadlines and best practices worth sharing.
Two disciplines keep the board honest. First, keep the number of KPIs small: the board is a conversation tool, not a dashboard of everything the team does. Second, read trends, not days. Chapter 2 calls a downward trend the gold in the red: not a failure to hide, but the process pointing at exactly where improvement effort belongs next.
Chapter 5 of the book adds that the board must be owned by the team, not the manager, and updated daily. A board that only changes when a leader visits is decoration, and the team will treat it that way within a fortnight.
Related questions
- What is a huddle board, and how do I set one up?
- How do I run a daily team huddle?
- Why do daily huddles fail, and how do I fix ours?
Source: Continuous Improvement in the Workplace, Ch. 2 (Effective Communication for Continuous Improvement) and Ch. 5 (Measuring Success and Ensuring Sustainability).